The
Bauman Family Foundation (BFF) was established in 1982 by Lionel R. Bauman, a New York City lawyer and businessman
who was a partner in the real-estate development firm Eugene M. Grant
& Company. Upon
Bauman's death in 1987, the Foundation was the beneficiary
of his estate.

BFF is dedicated to “achieving
the values of a true democratic society—the
common good and general welfare, as articulated in the Constitution.”
The way to best realize this objective, says the Foundation, is to promote
“progressive political and social change”—not
in the form of minor alterations that “merely ameliorate symptoms,”
but rather, in the form of far-reaching, “systematic
changes.” At present, BFF focuses
its philanthropy on advocacy in the following three areas:

1. “Protect[ing] the environment
and public health,” whereby the Foundation supports organizations committed to the anti-capitalist agendas of radical
environmentalism, whose ultimate goal, as writer Michael Berliner has
explained,
is “not clean air and clean water, [but] rather … the
demolition of technological/industrial civilization.”

2. “Non-partisan civic
engagement
in the political process,” an ideal that, by BFF's reckoning, can
best be achieved by such measures as: (a) eliminating voter ID
requirements; (b) restoring the voting rights of convicted felons;
(c) allowing
people to become registered voters via the Internet; (d) ensuring
that every eligible voter is permanently registered;
and (e) mandating
a minimum early-voting period. Notably, each of these measures increases the possibility of voter fraud by making it more difficult to verify the identity and eligibility of voters.

Georgetown University's Public Policy Institute professor Gary
Bass, who in 1983 founded OMB Watch—a nonprofit research and
advocacy organization that “promotes greater government
accountability and transparency and increased citizen participation
in public policy decisions”—has been BFF's executive
director
since July 2011. In the 1990s, Bass led OMB Watch in
challenging a number of provisions in the Republican Party's famous
“Contract
with America.” For instance, says
BFF, Bass helped stop a proposal “that would have undermined our
society's safety net,” and he helped prevent “a constitutional
amendment to balance the U.S. budget that would have seriously harmed
human service delivery.”